Petersburg Patriotism in 1812: Lubok Artists and Russian National Identity
By
Stephen M. Norris
Miami University
Symposium: “Imagining St. Petersburg”
1
Prelude
In a sense, 1812 gave Ivan Terebenev the opportunity he always wanted. Born in
St. Petersburg in 1780, Terebenev’s father pushed his son to follow him into the field of
sculpture from an early age. Terebenev senior sent his son to the Imperial Academy in
Petersburg when the boy was just five. Ivan dutifully began this career and showcased
his skills in many exhibitions. He told a friend, however, that he longed to be a painter.
Ivan may have wanted to change his artistic focus, but he did not yet have a subject or an
outlet to indulge his desire.
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia altered this situation. When the Grand Army
entered Russian territory in June 1812, Terebenev’s patriotic outrage paralleled that of
many of his fellow countrymen. In St. Petersburg, far from the action, Terebenev longed
to do something to help the war effort. He decided to paint. Instead of using a canvas,
however, Terebenev turned to the Russian popular print known as the lubok. Terebenev
in 1812 did not just want to indulge in what he saw as idle art; he sought to use his artistic
abilities to influence his fellow Russians. The lubok was just the source for Terebenev’s
desires to turn from sculpture, express his patriotic beliefs, and persuade his countrymen
to fight against the French. By combining these three elements, Terebenev helped to
redefine not only an artistic genre, he also began to redefine Russian national identity.
Terebenev was not alone in this endeavor--two other artists (and several unknown
ones) also turned to the lubok in 1812 and helped to redefine Russianness in the wake of
Napoleon’s invasion. Although these artists had been trained in the best Petersburg
academies, they turned away from the culture of Peter’s capital and sought to define what
2
it meant to be Russian in other terms. Petersburg patriotism in 1812, therefore, proved to
be very anti-Petersburg in nature. The story of these artists and their work is the subject
of this article. While many historians have discussed the importance of 1812 as an
impetus for the rethinking of Russian identity, few have studied how this process began
during the war itself. In addition to exploring this development, this article sheds light on
how the redefinition of Russianness and the turn away from Petrine ideas was
popularized during the war. To understand these trends it is necessary to explore the
lives of Ivan Terebenev and his artistic contemporaries.
Terebenev’s Turn
Ivan Terebenev, despite his desire to paint, became a skilled sculptor. In 1785,
while a child, he began studies at the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, where he
remained until 1800. The Academy had been established in 1757 and it embraced the
artistic ideas of Western Europe, particularly France. Russia’s best-known sculptor of the
eighteenth century, Fedot Shubin, had studied at the Academy under a Frenchman, and
passed on French techniques and ideas to later students, Terebenev included. While a
student, Terebenev began to learn classical sculpture, and for his efforts was awarded
gold and silver medals.
Terebenev’s training, in other words, reflected the tensions of Peter the Great’s
philosophies about culture, Russia, and his capital, tensions seen quite clearly in the
Academy’s teaching. On the one hand, pupils at the Imperial art school learned about the
techniques, ideas, and styles of Western Europe, keeping with Peter’s original intentions
about Westernizing Russia. On the other hand, the Imperial Academy’s curriculum
consisted almost entirely of copying techniques and attitudes toward art in Western
3
Europe (and, under Catherine II’s insistence, even sending promising artists to France or
Italy).1 Russian artists and sculptors learned only to imitate the portraits, landscapes, and
sculptures of the West, with little attention given over to any native traditions.2 Built into
the curriculum, however, was a stress on Italian classical themes, particularly historical
paintings of Roman antiquity. These themes formed part of the training at academies
throughout Europe, including the French Academy in Paris.3 By learning about the heroes
of classical Rome such as Junius Brutus and Mucius Scaevola, Terebenev and his fellow
students at the Academy were exposed to concepts of civic virtue and patriotism. The
Imperial Art Academy at the time Terebenev studied in many ways perfectly embodied
the problems of post-Petrine culture in Russia, one that wavered between imitation and
tradition.
Initially, other than his professed desire to switch to painting, Terebenev showed
no signs of rejecting this training. After he finished his studies in St. Petersburg, he took
a post at a gymnasium in Tver’, a town located on the road between St. Petersburg and
Moscow. Terebenev’s later turn toward Russian artistic traditions nicely corresponds to
1
W. Bruce Lincoln, Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in
Russia (NY: Viking, 1998), 96.
2
Christopher Ely argues that Russian artists had difficulties even attempting to depict the Russian
landscape before the 1820s. For artists in the 18th and early 19th Centuries, trained as they were to
appreciate the artistic merits of Italian and French pastoral scenes, the Russian landscape simply could not
be painted. For more o this subject, see Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in
Imperial Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2002).
3
Jacques-Louis David, the famous French artist of the Revolution, had a similar training to
Terebenev’s in the French Academy of the 1760s-1770s. The stress on Roman history, however, created a
generation of artists such as David who celebrated civic virtue and patriotism through the use of classical
history. See Warren Roberts, Jacques-Louis David: Revolutionary Artist (University of North Carolina
Press, 1989), 4-5; and Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (NY: Knopf, 1988),
171-174. Schama discusses how the French Academy’s stress on republican Rome encouraged “a new
generation of history painting expressly designed to inculcate the public virtues associated with republican
Rome: patriotism, fortitude, integrity, and frugality.” In particular, heroes such as Brutus, Scaevola,
Horatio Cocles, and Scipio were depicted in various Salon shows of the late 1770s. These Roman subjects
found their way into the Petersburg Academy as well.
4
his movement from the Imperial capital closer to Russia’s “spiritual” home. The
culmination of Terebenev’s early career as a sculptor came just before Napoleon’s
invasion, when Terebenev helped to design some of the bas-reliefs for the newly
renovated Admiralty Building in St. Petersburg. The building was itself a symbol of
Petrine power, and its golden spire continues to dominate the Petersburg skyline, an
emblem of Russia’s naval tradition established by Peter, and thus a symbol of Peter’s
attempt to make Russia into a Western state. Although Peter had originally had the
Admiralty built, Ivan Korobov rebuilt the structure in the 1730s. By the time of
Alexander I, the building had fallen into disrepair, and some officials even talked of
moving the Admiralty to Kronstadt. Alexander I, however, intended to preserve this
piece of Petrine Petersburg, and he hired Andreian Zakharov (1761-1811) to redesign the
building.
Zakharov studied in Paris and took up a post at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1787.
When he began his work on the Admiralty, he commissioned several of his students,
Terebenev among them. Terebenev’s contribution to the Admiralty can still be seen
today—he carved the relief above the main archway of the Admiralty entitled “The
Establishment of a Fleet.” In this work one can glimpse the tenor of Terebenev’s early
training and the training of all students at the Imperial Academy. Neptune, the classical
god of the sea, hands Peter the Great, also in classical attire, a trident, the symbol of
power over the seas.4 Russian history as an extension of classical Roman history
captures the influence of Western concepts of art in Imperial Russia, a tradition from
which Terebenev emerged.
4
William Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 357.
5
When Napoleon invaded Russia in June 1812, however, Terebenev turned away
(although not completely) from this tradition. Napoleon’s invasion and all of its
meanings—particularly the explicit attempt to export French culture through the violence
of the Grand Army—awakened nationalism in Terebenev and his fellow Russians. For
Terebenev, the ideas of the Imperial Academy and his background in sculpture were not
the means to give a voice to his patriotism, and so he turned to the popular print known as
the lubok. In doing so, he helped to transform not only this image and its importance in
Russian cultural life, he also helped to transform ideas about Russian nationhood.
Terebenev’s turn away from the Petersburg traditions of the Academy, in other words,
had important ramifications. He was not the only artist to make this turn, just (initially at
least) the most significant. Before exploring these topics, however, we turn to the lubok
before 1812 and why it served as the ideal genre for Terebenev.
Picturing the Russian Past: The Lubok and Russian Culture
The lubok, although long considered to be a manifestation of Russian folk art, has
been little studied by historians.5 These popular prints can best be described as lively
illustrations similar to posters or European broadsides with short texts, usually at the
bottom of the picture.6 The term itself, as well as its adjective, lubochnyi, derives from
an old Russian word meaning “bast,” which is the soft layer of wood taken from trees in
the spring then used to make baskets, other containers, and even shoes. In early modern
5
The major exceptions are Dianne Farrell, “Popular Prints in the Cultural History of EighteenthCentury Russia” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980); Jeffrey Brooks, When
Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton University Press, 1985);
Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I (Cornell University Press, 1995); and
Karen Petrone, “Family, Masculinity, and Heroism in Russian War Posters of the First World War,” in
Billie Melman, ed., Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 (New York:
Routledge, 1998): 95-120.
6
Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 62-63.
6
Russian culture, artists often used these pieces of bast in place of expensive parchment,
and thus the crude woodcut images painted on them became known as lubochnye kartinki
(or “bast pictures”). Russians eventually came to refer to these cheap prints as the lubok,
and even as narodnye kartinki, or “popular pictures.” 7 The technique used to make these
prints was as simple as the finished product. The artist placed a watery tempera on a
slight pencil design, and then painted an illustration using pigments diluted in egg
emulsion or sticky vegetable substances. When the lubok artist painted these materials
onto wood blocks and pressed them on cheap paper, the result was a combination of a
watercolor and a hand painting that gave the finished image an improvised look.8
The first examples of the folk woodblock prints date from the seventeenth
century. These lubki were cheap icons painted on boards for those who could not afford
to buy icons painted by recognized artists. Because of their accessibility, the pictures
thrived, and by the time of Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) they depicted a variety of
subjects, from hunting scenes and the life of peasants to satirical pictures of
contemporary politics. During the reign of Peter, the visual arts were transformed from
exclusively religious in subject to more modern forms of imagery and image making.
While this “revolution” changed Russian imagery, the lubok tradition had its origins prior
to Peter’s time, although the images had not established themselves as truly secular or
very popular.9 What changed in Peter’s time, however, was the function of the lubok in
Russian culture.
7
See James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery (University of Chicago Press,
1997), 305-6; and Alison Hilton, Russian Folk Art (Indiana University Press, 1995), 308-309.
8
E.I. Itkina, Russkii rizovannyi lubok kontsa XVIII-nachala XX veka (Moscow: Russkaia kniga,
1992), 44-45.
9
Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery, 307.
7
Peter himself began to see the importance of images in shaping attitudes, and his
Holy Synod attempted to control lubok production and sale.10 Since this effort proved
difficult at best, Peter’s reign marked a shift in Russian popular imagery from religious to
secular contents, and the lubok reflected this change. These “popular prints” now
disseminated information and government propaganda, while others even criticized
government policies. The most famous lubok of all, “The Barber Cutting the Beard of an
Old Believer (Fig. 1),” dates from the Petrine period and was a criticism of Peter’s
policies. Once the images became secular, therefore, they often took a stance that ran
counter to the culture of Petersburg. “Barber” was produced by Old Believers, and for
the rest of the imperial period, tsarist censors remained obsessed with the prints produced
by Old Believer communities.11 In 1812, however, some of the same criticisms, although
certainly more subtle, came from officially approved artists. Before that time, however,
the lubok after Peter the Great (and for the remainder of the Imperial period) functioned
as a source of information, as a means to persuade, and as a source of entertainment.12
As the content of the lubok became more secular over the course of the eighteenth
century,13 the audience for these prints became more “popular,” in the broadest sense of
10
Ibid., 307-8.
11
During the Crimean War, for example, Ivan Snegirev, the Moscow censor responsible for
popular prints, wrote in his diary that government ministers frequently referred to their fear of the
influence that Old Believer prints might have among other Russians. See I. M. Sengirev, Dnevnik Ivana
Mikhailovicha Snegireva Vol. II (Moscow, 1904), 25-30.
12
Hilton, Russian Folk Art, 109-112. Hilton states that although the lubok “fits into the framework
of folk art,” its political function separated them from other, more purely decorative varieties of Russian
folk art.
13
D.A. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki (Vol. I) (St. Petersburg, 1881); Cracraft, The Petrine
Revolution in Russian Imagery, 309, states that three-fourths of all images produced from 1750-1799 were
non-religious.
8
the word.14 Peasants, city dwellers, and members of the small middle classes all
purchased lubki, while the artists were mostly townspeople, who depicted government
regulations and listened “to the buzz of the marketplace” in coming up with themes.15
Russians could buy these prints at the shops set up by publishers, at booths located in
most large towns, at the various fairs held throughout the country, or from traveling
peddlers (see Figures 2-4). As lubki became more and more accessible to Russians of all
classes, their importance as disseminators of information and their persuasive power
continued to grow--thus one can refer to them as “propaganda,” taking a definition that
simply means the dissemination of information.16 The end of the eighteenth century saw
hundreds of these popular images in circulation throughout the Russian Empire, meaning
that by the turn of the nineteenth century, the lubok had become recognizable
everywhere.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, prints could be found at the Spasskii
Bridge in Moscow, where most publishers had their shops. The demand for prints had
created a thriving business. Coloring them had become a virtual cottage industry in its
own right, for lubok publishers employed self-trained peasant women and children in
villages near Moscow. They painted in four shades: green, yellow, purple, and red, in an
effort to brighten the prints to make them attractive to their fellow peasants.17 The colors
14
Hilton, Russian Folk Art, 112.
15
Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery, 309.
16
See Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry Abrams,
1997), 7. Clark rightly notes that the word “propaganda” had a more neutral meaning. Only in the
twentieth century, after the Great War, did the term take on negative connotations.
17
Dmitrii Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, Vol. 5 (St. Petersburg, 1881), 20-31; I. E. Zabelin,
Istoriia goroda Moskvy (Moscow, 1869), 628; Farrell, “Popular Prints,” 39-41.
9
helped to connect the lubok to the icon, particularly the use of red, which had long been
used by Russian icon painters to signify the blood of martyrs and the fire of faith. Lubok
artists used similar colors in their attempts to create an appealing product.
Strictly speaking, the word lubok refers to the images printed onto pieces of bast.
These “lubki” began to die out by the nineteenth century in Russia, when lithographic
processes began to dominate the production of images. However, the lubok style of
illustrating images in a simple, naive manner continued long after the popular picture
itself, as it was originally defined, gave way to lithographs. The production of lubki may
have changed from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but the style and the
content of these images remained more or less stable. Not quite folk art, but not quite
high art, the lubok represented a cultural product that appealed to a wide percentage of
the Russian population. It was to this tradition and idea that the lubok both depicted
Russian culture and helped Russians imagine their place within the Russian nation that
Terebenev turned to in 1812.
Imagining Russia in 1812
With the enemy in Russia, Ivan Terebenev wanted to express his outrage and also
exhort his fellow countrymen to fight. He also desired to turn away from sculpture and to
a form of art that would allow him to express these ideas. Given the short history
sketched above, the lubok seemed ideal for this task, and so Terebenev began to depict
the patriotism that exploded throughout Russia in the wake of 1812. He was not alone in
this respect. Ivan Alekseevich Ivanov also moved away from his training in 1812,
inspired by Terebenev’s example.18 Ivanov was born in 1779 in Moscow and entered the
18
Biographical information on Ivanov and Venetsianov is taken from A. A. Vereshchagin,
Russkaia karikatura, Vol. II, Otechestvennaia voina: Terebenev, Venetsianov, Ivanov (St. Petersburg,
1912). Also helpful were the works of Rosalind Gray and John Bowlt cited below.
10
Academy at Petersburg in 1789. Upon his graduation, Ivanov was awarded a certificate
of the first degree and the rank of artist [khudozhnik]. The same year, Ivanov set off on
an artistic expedition to the Caucasus region, including Tauride, where he helped collect
prints from that region. After his trip, Ivanov eventually settled into a job at the Imperial
Glass Factory in St. Petersburg.
Shortly after Napoleon’s invasion, early in 1813, Ivanov took up a position at the
Imperial Public Library (now the National Library in St. Petersburg). It was here, in the
capital, sometime in 1812-1813 that he saw Terebenev’s prints and decided to express his
own patriotic outrage by the same means. Like his inspiration, no one knew how Ivanov
settled on the lubok as a genre to express his beliefs, although, like Terebenev, no doubt it
had to do with the influence and popularity the prints enjoyed by the early nineteenth
century.
The third significant artist of 1812 was an outsider to the Petersburg cultural
scene. Aleksei Gavrilovich Venetsianov was born in 1780, the same year as Terebenev,
in Moscow. Venetsianov’s father worked as a tradesman, selling flowers, bushes, and
similar items in one of the popular markets of the former capital.19 Like Terebenev and
Ivanov, Venetsianov developed an interest in art from an early age. Unlike his more
privileged contemporaries, however, Venetsianov did not attend the Academy in St.
Petersburg. Instead, he lived in Moscow until 1802, studying art however he could. In
1802, however, Venetsianov moved to St. Petersburg to take up a position as a civil
servant.
At the same time he also studied with Vladimir Lukich Borovikovskii (1757-
1825), the son of a Ukrainian icon painter who had moved to the capital and won acclaim
(and commissions) from both Catherine II and Paul I.
Venetsianov worked with
Borovikovskii for ten years, but developed an ambiguous relationship with the artistic
atmosphere in the capital.
19
Lincoln, Between Heaven and Hell, 146.
11
On the one hand, Venetsianov loved the opportunities that Petersburg afforded
him—he visited the Hermitage often and he learned a great deal from Borovikovskii, an
Academy painter.20 On the other hand, Venetsianov developed a distaste for the cultural
climate of Petersburg that manifested itself in 1807-1808. Late in 1807, Venetsianov
decided to found a journal devoted to caricature. Although the genre developed in France
and had taken off in England by that year, Venetsianov wanted to establish a Russian
tradition in caricature. More specifically, he wanted to use caricature to poke fun at the
Francophile ways of the Russian upper classes. As an outsider who had moved to
Petersburg, Venetsianov was struck by the predominance of the French language and
French manners among Russia’s elite. The fact that the Academy of Arts promoted
French ideas also entered into Venetsianov’s quest for a more “Russian” artistic tradition.
Although his caricature journal would borrow a Western genre, it would do so as a means
to satirize the Western influence on Russian life.
Venetsianov founded his journal, Russian Caricature, and submitted the idea to
the censors. It passed, and first appeared in January 1808. On the cover of his third
issue, however, Venetsianov placed his image, “The Grandee” (Figure 5). This caricature
featured a large Russian official dressed in European clothes and lounging on a couch.
With him is his mistress, while important papers lay scattered on the floor. In front of the
couch stands a mirror, through which one can glimpse a reflection of the petitioners
waiting to see the government official.
The meanings of the image hardly need
elaboration, nor do the decision by imperial censors to shut down the journal. The
Minister of Internal Affairs, Prince A. B. Kurakin, wrote to the Minister of
Enlightenment, Count P. V. Zavadovsky, that Venetsianov should “apply his talent to a
20
Rosalind Polly Gray, “The Real and the Ideal in the Work of Aleksei Venetsianov” Russian
Review 58 (October 1999), 657. John Bowlt refers to Borovikovskii as “perhaps the greatest exponent of
the Western artistic ideal in Russian painting.” J.E. Bowlt, “Russian Painting in the Nineteenth Century” in
T.G. Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Indiana University Press, 1983), 114.
12
much better subject.”21 Venetsianov’s desires to promote certain ideas through caricature
would have to wait.
The wait lasted four years. With Napoleon’s entry into Russia and the appearance
of Terebenev’s prints, Venetsianov got his opportunity to develop Russian caricature and
to apply his talents to a much better subject. Much like Ivanov, Venetsianov also gained
inspiration from Terebenev’s prints. Together the three artists of St. Petersburg began to
produce lubki that lampooned Napoleon and the French, stressed the significance of
Russian traditions, and depicted the significance of the invasion. Their work from 1812
to 1815 allows us the opportunity to imagine the culture of the Patriotic War through the
eyes of its producers. Above all, their work gives us the chance to imagine the kind of
patriotism produced in Petersburg during the Patriotic War.
Petersburg Patriotism as Antithesis: The Patriotic Culture of 1812
Terebenev, Ivanov, and Venestianov all turned to the lubok during wartime.
Although these images had become increasingly popular over the course of the eighteenth
century, they had not yet appeared in large numbers to illustrate a specific event. Wars in
particular had long defined Russian identity, but only the Seven Years’ War of 17561763 and Catherine II’s wars against the Turks produced lubki, albeit only twenty.22 One
of these prints, “The Russian Cossack Strikes the Prussian Dragoon” (Figure 6), from the
Seven Years’ War in 1759, for example, illustrates the precedents that nineteenth-century
Russian artists and publishers drew upon in their own lubki.23 This lubok features a
single Cossack on horseback dispatching two Germans, one firing a musket vainly at the
21
Aleksei Gavrilovich Venestianov: Stat’i, pis’mi, sovremenniki o khudozhnike (Leningrad, 1980),
147.
22
Diane Ecklund Farrell, ‘Popular Prints in the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century Russia”
Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1980, 200-201. During the Seven Years’ War, four lubki featured
Cossacks.
23
The print is reproduced in Vladimir Denisov, Voina i lubok (Petrograd, 1916), 1-2.
13
Russian, the other succumbing to the Cossack’s pike. Reminiscent of military prints that
depicted Peter the Great dressed as Alexander the Great, folk images of bogatyrs such as
Ilia Muromets, and popular imagery and myths that date back to the Polish invasion of
1612 during the Time of Troubles (not to mention the long-standing link that connected
the lubok to the Russian icon), this print indicates that the artists of 1812 drew on older
ideas and myths of Russian history. Still, though, the image of 1759 was unusual in that
it depicted an event as it happened.
Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in 1812 at the head of the largest army ever
raised and with the intention of exporting his conceptions of the French Revolution
changed the lubok and how it depicted historical events. Terebenev alone would produce
forty-eight lubki devoted to the Patriotic War. Between the years 1812 and 1814, when
Alexander I marched at the head of the Russian army in Paris, 216 popular prints
appeared in Russia devoted to the war.24
In terms of sheer numbers, the war
revolutionized the Russian lubok.25
Lubok artists portrayed Napoleon in the early months of the war in a variety of
ways, but all of them concentrated their attention on the French emperor. Terebenev’s
“Napoleon’s Treatment in Russia,” (Figure 7) one of the first images to appear in St.
Petersburg, depicts three Russian soldiers who have stuffed the French leader into a
24
M. Peltzer, “Russkaia politicheskaia kartinka 1812 goda: usloviia proizvodstva i
khudozhestvennye osobennosti” in B. M. Sokolov, ed., Mir narodnoi kartinki (Moscow, 1999), 176.
Rovinskii lists 148 in his collection.
25
John Bowlt, the doyen of Russian art historians, has written that the war of 1812 introduced
important changes both in Russian art and Russian caricature. Bowlt views the work of Terebenev, Ivanov,
and Venetsianov as caricatures that made use of the lubok tradition, thus enhancing their appeal. After
1812, Russian caricature experienced uneven growth. While I agree with Bowlt’s assessment of how
Terebenev and his contemporaries blended classical training with the lubok to produce a powerful set of
images in 1812-1814, I view these caricatures as lubki, ones that transformed this genre in the nineteenth
century and paved the way for future explosions of popular prints during wartime. The Russian
government viewed the 1812 prints as lubki and defined them as such in the 1851 law regulating imagery,
as did Dmitry Rovinskii, who included the 1812 images in his collection of “people’s pictures.” For the
views of Bowlt and how 1812 transformed the Russian art scene, see his two articles, “Russian Painting in
the Nineteenth Century” and “Nineteenth-Century Russian Caricature” both in Theofanis Stavrou, ed., Art
and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia.
14
barrel. The container is marked “kaluzhskoe testo,” or “Kaluga Dough,” after the route
Napoleon took to leave Russia (although the language also suggests a reference to a place
for excrement (kal) and for stagnant, dirty water).26 Dressed in the uniform of the regular
Russian army, a soldier to the right of Napoleon is force-feeding him a large loaf of
gingerbread marked “Viazma,” while a Russian to the left pours over him a can of liquid
labeled “boiled in the Moscow Fire.”
A third Russian soldier stands over the French
leader, brewing tea to pour over the French emperor. Around Napoleon’s head, the three
have draped bubliki, the thick, ring-shaped bread rolls so popular in Russia. The message
of the lubok is clear: Napoleon may have invaded Russia, but here he has received a
“proper” Russian welcome, complete with the snacks one would normally offer such a
preeminent guest.27
Ivanov’s lubok “Napoleon Forms a New Army from Various Freaks and
Cripples” suggests that the French army and its leader are weak opponents (Fig. 8).28
Among the freaks depicted in the lubok, which features the French leader placing
weakened troops on horseback amidst a host of other unfit soldiers, are two large figures
labeled “Polish Cossacks.”29 The subject resembles that of another Terebenev caricature,
“The Retreat of the French Cavalry Who Ate Their Horses in Russia” (Fig. 9),30 which
illustrates a group of ill-fed French troops shuffling behind their leader, who pretends to
26
Gosudarsvennaia Publichnaia Istoricheskaia Biblioteka, Otdel Redkikh Knig (hereafter cited as
GPIB ORK), Papka 1, ‘karikatury 1812 goda.’. This image was one of the first to appear in St. Petersburg.
27
This lubok resembles a second Terebenev image entitled ‘The Destruction of the Worldwide
Monarchy,’ which depicts a Russian peasant and Cossack attacking Napoleon, who flies out of a barrel.
Surrounding the barrel are the artefacts of Napoleon’s attempt to establish a ‘worldwide monarchy’: skulls,
loot, and boxes labeled with materials taken from Napoleon’s conquests in Holland, Switzerland,
Württemburg, and Italy. See GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
28
GPIB ORK, Papka 2.
29
Ibid., Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 214. Many Poles fought with Napoleon
against the Russians in 1812.
30
GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
15
be on horseback. Bringing up the rear of this motley gang is a Mameluke dressed in a
woman’s coat to keep warm and carrying a horse’s leg to eat at home.31 Forced to eat
their horses and shamefully flee Russia, this image suggests that the experience of war
has emasculated Napoleon and his troops.32
Lubok artists also contrasted the French troops, often starving and weak, with
Russian women defending their homeland. Venetsianov’s lubok “The Hungry French
Rats, Under the Command of the Old Woman Vasilisa,” depicts three French
“marauders” captured by Russian peasant women under the guidance of a woman on
horseback (Fig. 10).33 The three French troops attempted to forage for food in a Russian
village, and were captured by Vasilisa, who now has them lassoed. One of the marauders
kneels before his new commander and is distinguished by his konfederatka (the Polish
national headgear of the time, known for its rectangular shape and lack of peak), while
the other two French soldiers stand despondently, seemingly emaciated. To the right of
Vasilisa are a group of three peasant girls and one boy, all waving pitchforks at the
French would-be thieves. At the bottom of the image a rooster bites at the top of a staff
adorned with the golden eagle, Napoleon’s symbol. The image implies that Russia has
transformed the French troops, once seen as virtually invincible, into a pitiful, begging lot
that even Russia’s women could defeat.34
31
Ibid. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 158-159.
32
As Molly Wesling has pointed out, this image is historically accurate, although exaggerated.
French troops did wear women’s clothing during their retreat from Russia for lack of anything else to wear.
See Molly Wesling, Napoleon in Russian Cultural Mythology, 13. For eyewitness descriptions of French
soldiers wearing women’s clothes, see Rossiia pervoi poloviny XIX v. glazami inostrantsev (Leningrad,
1991), 223, 255, 276, 289.
33
GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
34
This print lambasts the Poles who decided to fight with Napoleon rather than with Russia.
During 1812, a great number of Poles, particularly from the Duchy of Warsaw, joined Napoleon’s Grand
Army in hopes that a defeat of Russia would create a new Polish Kingdom independent of Russian control.
Many Russian memoirs of the war expressed greater hostility toward the Poles who served with Napoleon
than the French, and used the presence of Polish troops in the Grand Army to question the loyalty of all
Poles. The images of Poles among a foreign army invading Russia also conjured up memories of the 1612
16
This visual illustration had a factual basis. During the French occupation of
Smolensk, an old peasant woman named Vasilisa decided to stand up to the invaders
occupying her homeland. She came across two drunken French soldiers in the street one
day. Inviting them into her izba, Vasilisa got the two drunk. With the Frenchmen
thoroughly inebriated, she then burned her hut to the ground.35
This caricature of the French found expression in two other lubki from 1813. The
first, “The French are Frightened by a Goat,” from Terebenev, depicts four French
soldiers fleeing from a peasant izba guarded by a solitary, old peasant woman (Fig. 11).36
Through the open window of the peasant hut one can glimpse a goat tied to a small shed.
The first soldier, apparently hearing the bleating of the goat, asks the old woman “who is
shouting?”, to which the starukha replies, “my own goat over there [tam rodnye v
Klevu].” The second French soldier asks “where is the goat going [kuda koza?],” while
his comrade, further away, states “there is a Cossack in the yard [nadvor’ Kozak].” The
fourth Frenchman, nearly out the door in his haste to escape from the “Cossack,”
plaintively asks “but where is the Cossack going? [A chto kuda Kozak?].”37 Using a play
on words and rhyme (the Russian words for Cossack, kazak, and goat, koza, sound
similar), this lubok not only illustrates the fear of the French when confronted by an old
Polish invasion during the Time of Troubles. For more on the Polish troops and reaction to them, see Janet
Hartley, “Russia in 1812 Part I,” 179-180; K. K. Arnol’di, “Frantsuzy v Mogileve-na-Dnepre” Russkaia
starina 4/8 (1873): 233-237; and Roman Soltyk, Napoleon en 1812: Mémoires historiques et militaires sur
la campagne de Russie (Paris, 1836).
35
A. E. Zarin, Zhenshchiny–geroini v 1812 godu: ocherki i razskazy iz epochi velikoi
otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow, 1913), 20-27; Hartley, “Russia in 1812, Part 1,” 195. Zarin, writing 100
years later as part of the centenary memories of the war, writes, “had Napoleon known of such women he
would not have invaded Russia.”
36
GPIB ORK, Papka 2.
37
Ibid. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 195. The lubok resembles another image,
entitled “The French marauders are frightened by a goat.” See Ibid., vol. 2, 159.
17
woman and a goat, but their lack of intelligence as well.38 A second lubok that echoes
these themes is “The Grandmother Kuz’minishna Treats the French Marauders with
Shchi” (Fig. 12).39 This image from an unidentified artist, cruder than other lubki of the
time as a result of poorer production technique, portrays four French soldiers eating
shchi, a Russian soup, which they find distasteful. One of the Frenchmen, who are all
near starvation, complains “Oh, the soup is not good!–Madam!–The soup is awful!,”
warning his comrades not to eat too much. The babushka replies “here is good soup for
you made from filth, eat up!”40 The text at the bottom of the image boldly proclaims:
“Kuzminishna! You are worthy of your good name, taking four Frenchmen as though for
a game.” Again the desperation of the French troops, a state in which their Russian
experiences has left them, has led them to be fooled by a Russian peasant woman.
Other images ridiculed the French people in general, including those living in
Russia.41 The print “French Teachers and Artists Leave Moscow” (Fig. 13), also by an
unknown artist, depicts six French residents of Moscow leaving the city in the wake of
the destruction their former countrymen have brought.42 From left to right in the image, a
cook, coachman, wine-merchant, musician, and a fashionably dressed woman take leave
38
Although the text supplies the joke, the subject of image could still be easily interpreted by an
illiterate reader who could see an old woman scaring off four French soldiers. As Terebenev and his fellow
artists made clear, the texts of their caricatures were primarily meant to add further context to the image
itself.
39
GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
40
Ibid. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 203-204.
41
In this respect I disagree with the assessment of John Bowlt, who argues that “it was Napoleon,
rather than the French people as a whole, who was the target of abuse” from Russian artists. See Bowlt,
“Russian Painting,” 121. see also his article, “Art and Violence: The Russian Caricature in the Early
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” 20th Century Studies (December 1975): 56-76.
42
GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
18
of their city, imploring “Forgive us, Moscow!”43
Lubki also ridiculed the French for
following Napoleon, their artistic and commercial culture, and their perceived attempts to
dominate Europe.44 One of these prints deserves some commentary. Venetsianov’s
image “French Activity in a Store (Figure 14)” allowed the artist the chance to revisit an
old theme. The image features an enormous French woman (identified as “the Madam”
in Venetsianov’s text) lounging in a daybed within a “store.” Around the woman stand
sycophantic French courtiers, while a group of French women sit idly around a table. In
this lubok Venetsianov has depicted all of French culture as degenerate, but he has used
the same figures and structure he captured in his attack on French manners within Russia
in 1808 (see Figure 5). During the war against Napoleon, however, Venetsianov’s antiPetersburg overtones were deemed acceptable.
These depictions had important ramifications within Russia, and partly illustrated
actual events of the time.
Foreign residents were deported throughout Russia as
Napoleon’s army approached Moscow, and again after it left. In Moscow, the city
administration expelled thirty-nine foreigners (Germans, Austrians, Swiss, and Prussians
as well as French), including Armand Domergue, the stage manager of the Imperial
Theater. Many of these deportees had lived in Russia for a long time, while three of the
French held Russian citizenship. Similar events transpired in Kaluga, Kozel’sk, and
Borovsk.45
Because of the war, in other words, Venestianov’s prewar anti-French
43
Ibid. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 177. See also Venetsianov’s image
“Izgnanie iz Moskvy frantsuzskikh aktris” (“The Expulsion from Moscow of a French Actress”) for similar
themes, in Ibid., vol. 2, 178.
44
See Terebenev’s “The Carnival, or the Parisian Musician at Shrovetide,” “Napoleon Sells By
Auction His Stolen Antiques,” and the lubok from an unnamed artist, “Napoleon’s Impertinence” in GPIB
ORK, Papka 1 & 2; and the Venetsianov image “The French Store for Pomade and Perfumes” in
Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura, Vol. II.
45
Hartley, “Russia in 1812, Part 2,” 406. See also Domergue’s memoirs, La Russe pendant les
guerres de l’Empire (1805-1815). Souvenirs historiques Vol. 1 (Paris, 1835).
19
attitudes found fertile ground in Russian culture and certainly crystallized trends within
Russian society and government that had appeared before 1812.
The lubki of 1812 show how Napoleon and his French troops ignited a
nationalistic explosion in Russia when they invaded.46 The experience of the invasion
and subsequent Russian winter rendered Napoleon and his troops powerless, and the
lubki illustrated this view by depicting the French leader and soldiers as impotent when
confronted by peasant women, Cossacks, and peasant men. The popular pictures made
during 1812-1813 ensured that Russians who bought them would remember the
destruction that Napoleon had brought to Russia, and reassured viewers that the French
had paid a high price for what they had done. For the artists who made them, these prints
crystallized ideas about Westernization, foreign culture, and Francophobia that had
started to surface by the end of the eighteenth century.47 The images of 1812 popularized
these notions and helped to shape developments in Russian intellectual and cultural
movements for the rest of the nineteenth century.
When they made use of the symbols and figures that they did, the lubok artists of
1812-1815 drew on the shared myths, symbols, memories, and traditions of Russians to
help their fellow countrymen understand the war and to exhort them to fight. By using
the lubok tradition and iconic figures such as the peasant and Cossack, these artists did
not create a “modern” national identity so much as they refashioned long-standing myths
and memories about Russian nationhood.
As Anthony Smith has argued, native
46
Similar trends can be detected in other arts in Russia after Napoleon’s invasion. Musical
compositions performed in Moscow in 1813 included Steibelt’s The Burning of Moscow, among others,
while patriotic plays, folk songs, intermezzos, and satirical sketches dominated Moscow theaters the same
year. See Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power
(ms in progress). I thank Richard Stites for sharing with me portions of this manuscript. In addition to
Steibelt’s music, the serf composer Stepan Degtiaryov (1766-1813) also composed patriotic odes in the
wake of Napoleon’s invasion, including Mnin and Pozharsky, The Liberation of Moscow, and Napoleon’s
Flight, the last one unfinished.
47
Hans Rogger has noted how many educated Russians began to react against French manners and
morals in their country over the course of the eighteenth century. The events of 1812 and Venetsianov’s
images helped to spread these ideas throughout Russia. See Rogger, National Consciousness.
20
intellectuals often “rediscovered and reappropriated a selective ethno-history out of preexisting myths, symbols and traditions to be found in the historical record and in the
living memories of ‘the people’” in order to inspire nationalism.48 Perhaps nowhere does
this appropriation appear more clearly than in the Russian popular prints devoted to the
Napoleonic invasion.
The artists of 1812 also used their training in the Petersburg academies to blend
classical imagery with Russian wartime realities. Ivanov’s 1813 lubok “The Russian
Curtius” (Fig. 15) depicts a solitary Russian soldier fending off six Frenchmen, one of
whom is poised behind the Russian soldier about to deliver a death blow to the
defender.49 In the background of the lubok one can make out the Kremlin’s cathedrals,
easily identified by their golden onion domes. This print, like “The Russian Scaevola”
discussed below, used a legend from Roman mythology to illustrate an episode from
1812. A Moscow militiaman, as the text explains, saw a Polish colonel and thought that
he was Napoleon. He attempted to assassinate the colonel but was killed. The lubok
concludes that this “warrior [ratnik] of the Moscow militia is sacrificing his life for the
purpose of saving the fatherland [otechestvo] from the malicious enemy, Napoleon.”50
Although faced with such odds, this image suggests, the Russian soldier fought until the
very end to defend his homeland, symbolized here by the Moscow Kremlin. His actions
48
Anthony Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), 194. Although
theorists of national identity disagree about the origins, development, and significance of nationalism, most
acknowledge this process of appropriation and use of symbols. For more on this topic, see Eric
Hobsbawm’s work, particularly his volume co-edited with Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge University Press, 1983), and the collection of essays edited by Geoffrey Hosking and George
Schöpflin, Myths and Nationhood (NY: Routledge, 1997), among others.
49
GPIB ORK, Papka 2.
50
Ibid. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 208-209. The legend of Marcus Curtius
appears in Livy’s History of Rome, Book 7 Chapter 5. It tells of how an enormous cavern opened up in the
Roman Forum once “owing either to an earthquake or the action of some other force.” When city officials
were unable to fill the chasm, they turned to some local seers, who foretold that the city’s most prized
possession would have to be cast into it. Marcus Curtius, a young soldier who had distinguished himself in
battle, declared that nothing was more valuable in Rome than a courageous citizen, and he rode his horse
into the pit, which then closed. The tale is used as an illustration of the glory of dying for one’s fatherland.
21
clearly inspire fear within the Napoleon look-alike and his troops, who cower to the right
side of the action.
The Terebenev caricature “The Russian Hercules Drives Off the French” (Fig. 16)
depicts a gigantic Russian peasant wrestling with five puny French troops who cower in
fear from this Greek god.51 A French general, possibly Napoleon himself, crouches
behind a bush to the left of the gargantuan peasant, also trembling before the strength of
the Russian. In a similar manner to the print discussed above (Fig. 15), but with a
different outcome, this image stresses the willingness of the Russian peasant soldier and
partisan to fight any number of French troops. In this example, Terebenev symbolizes the
strength of the Russian peasant over the French invaders by casting the partisans as a
Hercules figure.52 The text notes that the Russian Hercules “crushed [the French] like a
man [davil kak muzh],”53 and the size of the Russian peasant evokes the idea of Russia’s
own vast size as a source of its strength.54
These examples demonstrate how Terebenev and his fellow artists in many ways
could not escape the ideas of the Petersburg Academy. All three artists discussed in this
essay had exposure to the classical themes popular throughout Europe at the time, and all
three were inspired by them. Terebenev, Ivanov, and Venetsianov used the genre of the
51
GPIB ORK, Papka 1. The lubok resembles the lubok “The Russian Hercules from the City of
Sychevka,” desribed in Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 160.
52
The image is strikingly similar to popular prints from later wars, particularly the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904-1905, when several lubki featured giant Russians tossing aside small Japanese troops. See
particularly “Cossack Petrukha” in GPIB ORK, OIK 1578-a.
53
GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
54
See also the Terebenev print “The Peasant Taking a Cannon from the French,” which features a
solitary Russian partisan stealing from the French while they were away. GPIB ORK, Papka 1. For more
Terebenev images featuring Cossacks and peasants, see, for example, the print “With what did he conquer
our enemy? The nagaika!”, a print that depicts a solitary Cossack thrashing a French cavalry officer with
his whip (nagaika); “The Firmness of the Russian Peasant,” which features a single Russian peasant
refusing to answer the questions of two French marauders; and “The Cossack Hands Napoleon a Visitor’s
Pass for a Reciprocal Visit,” which depicts a Cossack holding open a door for Napoleon and one of his
marshals, giving them a pass to “Moscow” in return for permission to go to Paris. All of these images are
in GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
22
popular print to depict Roman heroes such as Curtius and classical figures such as
Hercules to advance ideas about Russianness.
By doing this, the lubok artists
appropriated various cultures in a way that blurred distinctions between “high” and
“low.”55
The lubki from 1812-1815 also gave examples of what one might call a “Russian
spirit” that came to define a unique quality of Russian identity, and a trait that continued
to be articulated in future war images. Ideas about this Russian quality had begun to be
articulated during the eighteenth century among several Russian intellectuals, but it took
an event like 1812 to give these attitudes a popular context.56 Ivanov’s lubok “The Spirit
of the Fearless Russians” illustrates this theme best (Fig. 17).57 The image shows a
solitary, bearded Russian peasant standing with his hand over his heart as a French firing
squad, commanded by Napoleon himself, takes aim. To the right of the image a larger
group of Russians await the same fate. The image proves even more striking in its
setting, for these events transpire in Cathedral Square inside the Moscow Kremlin. The
text states that the scene depicts “the exemplary firmness of spirit in twenty Russian
peasants, whom Napoleon inhumanly [bezchelovechnno] sentenced to be shot for their
love of faith, Tsar, and the Fatherland [liubov’ k vere, gosudariu i otechestvu].”58 The
peasant about to be shot cries out “Remember me, Lord! Forgive me, good people!” as
he faces his executioners.
55
For an example of how this worked in France, see Roger Chartier, “Culture as Appropriation:
Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France” in Steven Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture:
Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Berlin, 1984), 229-253. Alison Hilton also
discusses this relationship in her article, “Russian Folk Art and ‘High’ Art in the Early Nineteenth Century”
in Theofanis Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 237-254.
56
See Rogger, National Consciousness, 82-83.
57
GPIB ORK, Papka 1.
58
Ibid. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 180.
23
This image had a factual basis. The journal Syn otechestva published an account
in 1812 that described actions taken by Napoleon in response to numerous guerrilla
activities of Russian peasants around Moscow. French troops who marauded the towns
near Moscow for food and supplies met with resistance from the Russians, prompting
Napoleon to order a large number of peasant men to be rounded up and executed in the
Kremlin as a warning against future disturbances.59
Other lubki offered further examples of the heroism of Russians in equally
dramatic forms. “The Russian Scaevola” recounts the legend of a Russian peasant
captured by the French and branded with the letter “N” (for Napoleon) on his forearm.
Based on the legend of Mutius Scaevola, a Roman famous for his courage and
patriotism,60 the lubok depicts the interior of a peasant hut, where this striking Russian
peasant, clad entirely in white, is in the process of cleaving his branded arm in half with a
small axe (Fig. 18).61 Five French soldiers shy away from the peasant, intimidated by his
superior strength and determination. The text states in a matter-of-fact fashion that
Scaevola would rather lose an arm “in order not to serve Napoleon, the enemy of the
59
Kaganovich, Ivan Ivanovich Terebenev, 1780-1815, 100-101. Kaganovich later claims that
Terebenev and his contemporaries “never created caricatures on abstract themes–all of them were closely
connected with the concrete facts of international life and the course of military actions,” a fact that
accounts for the popularity of their images (117).
60
Mucius Scaevola, surnamed Cordus, became famous when Porsenna, the king of the Etruscans,
besieged Rome during the Etruscan wars. Mucius, a patriotic Roman, disguised himself and gained entry
into Porsenna’s tent. Mistaking Porsenna’s secretary as the Etruscan king, Mucius killed him. When
Porsenna asked Mucius why he committed murder, legend has it that Mucius replied that he was a Roman
and had sworn to destroy Porsenna and his men or perish doing so. Out of anger at having failed to
accomplish his sworn task, Mucius then plunged his right hand into burning coals without uttering a sound.
Porsenna, as the legend recounts, was so astonished by the act that he withdrew from Rome. Mucius
obtained the surname Scaevola because he could no longer use his right hand, and had a statue erected in
his honor in Rome. The story of Mucius Scaevola appears most famously in Livy’s History of Rome (book
2, Chapters 12 and 13), where it is cited as an example of Roman patriotism.
61
GPIB ORK, Papka 2.
24
Fatherland,” while praising the “glory of the Russian [Rossian] in 1812 during the French
invasion of Russia.”62.
The idea of “Russiannesss” that the images of 1812 depict stressed the Russian
peasant and Cossack, but were not limited just to examples of the Russian “spirit.” While
the vast majority of war lubki included representations of heroism, intelligence, and
military strength, a few images associated Russian patriotism with certain figures and
institutions that symbolized Russian culture. Foremost among these were the tsar and the
Orthodox Church. Religion, and particularly the dominant role of the Orthodox Church in
Russian daily life, has long been associated with Russian national identity, especially its
popular variant. The images of 1812 made subtle references to this religious identity and
associated it with the emerging definitions of “Russianness” that characterized the
iconography of the Patriotic War. Lubki such as “The Spirit of the Fearless Russians”
(Fig. 17) described how the Russian peasants captured and then executed by Napoleon
died because of their “love for their faith, tsar and fatherland,” thus linking these three
concepts as components of national identity. Moreover, the peasant at the center of this
popular picture dies asking “Remember us, Lord,” words meant to imply that the heroism
and spirit of this brave Russian defender come from his faith.63
Other images offered more subtle reminders of the importance of Orthodoxy in
defining Russian national identity and patriotism.
The war lubok made frequent
reference to the French as “infidels” (basurmany) who had to be expelled from Russia.
Above all, however, Orthodoxy and its association with patriotism in the 1812 images
could be seen in the background of the many war lubki that featured Russian Orthodox
62
Ibid. Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinki, vol. 2, 208. This 1813 image from Ivanov was
clearly drawn from an 1812 Terebenev image of the same title. See Vereshchagin, Russkaia karikatura,
153-154. In addition, at least two other kartinki recounting the same legend appeared in 1813-1814.
63
This association of Russian national identity with faith and the tsar also appears in a
proclamation issued by a peasant partisan to his followers in 1812: “You are people of the Russian faith,
you are Orthodox peasants! Take up arms for the faith and die for your tsar!” Quoted in Geoffrey Hosking,
Russia: People and Empire, 134.
25
Churches.64
This visual association of “Russianness” with the Orthodox Church
reinforced the descriptions of Russians willing to die for their faith and also made it
possible for all Orthodox Russians to identify with the patriotism illustrated in the lubki
of 1812. Virtually every Russian town and village had an Orthodox church, and Russians
throughout the empire could define themselves and what made them different from the
French by focusing on their faith.
Future images of war continued to make this
association while also stressing even more explicitly the role of the Orthodox faith in
defining patriotism, particularly during the Crimean and Russo-Turkish Wars, which
lubok artists largely depicted as holy wars.
While the victory over the French and the subsequent celebration of the forces
that made this triumph possible continued to be the dominant message of the images of
1812 and early 1813, lubki from later in 1813 and 1814 increasingly stressed the role of
the tsar, Alexander I, in bringing about “divine victory.” In 1812, the tsar made no
appearance in war-related caricatures. Representations of the Russian tsar in 1813 also
were accompanied by the mythologizing of Kutuzov in Russian culture. The general,
who had commanded Russian forces at Borodino, died in April 1813. Terebenev and
other artists immediately began to immortalize him in their images of 1813-1814, then
turned to glorifying the tsar.65 One of Terebenev’s images from this period, “GeneralField Marshal Prince Golenishchev-Kutuzov in Smolensk Accepting Command of the
Russian Troops in August 1812" was widely copied in other prints (Fig. 19). Terebenev
based his portrayal of Kutuzov on a legend that circulated throughout Russia at the time.
The legend claimed that when Kutuzov first reviewed his troops after receiving command
64
See “The Spirit of the Fearless Russians,” Terebenev’s “Napoleon with S. . . After the Burning
of Moscow,” “The Ural Cossack Sila Vikhrev,” and “The Russian’s Chickens,” for examples of images
with Orthodox churches in them.
65
Kaganovich, Ivan Ivanovich Terebenev, 1780-1815, 119-121.
26
of the army, an eagle soared above him, symbolizing the great future in store for him.66
This omen became a standard element in other lubki depicting Kutuzov, and marked a
shift away from caricatures of Napoleon and illustrations of Russian bravery toward an
identification of the heroic leaders of the war.
The lubok “The Liberators of Europe (Fig. 20)” represented Terebenev’s
contribution to the growing number of images devoted to the emperor of Russia. This
print depicts Alexander parading through the streets of France alongside the leaders of
the successful coalition against Napoleon with thousands of Europeans cheering on their
liberator. Alexander I and his fellow leaders are depicted in allegoric form, with the
Russian emperor illustrated as Apollo, with the kings of Austria, Prussia, and England
depicted as Mars, Hercules, and Neptune, respectively. For Terebenev, Apollo
represented the ideal form for Alexander, because, as the text written by the artist
claimed, “God is in harmony with Apollo,” a sign that the Russian emperor was the most
blessed of his European contemporaries.67
As Richard Wortman has argued, the apotheosis of Alexander I as a popularly66
Ibid. I. P. Dreiling, a Riga-born officer in the Russian army that fought at Borodino, recorded in
his memoirs that an eagle flew above Kutuzov and his troops on the eve of the battle. According to
Dreiling, “the prince saw it first, bared his head and exclaimed ‘Hurrah!’” I. P. Dreiling, “Vospominaniia
uchastnika voiny 1812 gody” reprinted in F. A. Petrov, ed., 1812 god: vospominaniia voinov russkoi armii:
iz sobraniia otdela pis’mennykh istochnikov Gosudarstvennogo Istoricheskogo Muzeia (Moscow, 1991),
373.
67
See also, among others, “The Battle Near Paris,” which depicts a scene with close hand-to-hand
fighting between the French and Russians, who are led by Alexander I.67 Describing the way the Russian
tsar ‘perfectly smashed’ the French, this 1814 lubok from an unidentified artist places the figure of the tsar
at the center of the victory over Napoleon. Other images reinforce this new theme. “The Defeat of
Napoleon Near Paris by the Russian Emperor Alexander I” also describes the tsar’s final triumph over his
French counterpart. Alexander I’s entry into Paris also formed the subject of several lubki, among them
“The Ceremonial Entry into Paris of the Sovereign Emperor Alexander I,” which depicts a majestic
Alexander on horseback parading through the streets of the French capital as a crowd cheers him. The text
of the lubok stresses the divine nature of the Russian tsar and his triumph, stating that “the hands of all the
people clap” for Alexander, while “glad voices praise the tsar,” who “pacified” Europe. Describing the
Russian emperor as “all-powerful,” “Godlike,” and a “divine being [Bozhestvo],” this lubok proclaims not
only that Alexander “is worthy of his throne,” but also “the highest of all thrones.” A number of other
lubki extolled the virtues of the tsar, who by 1813 began to be depicted as the principle architect of the
victory over Napoleon. All of these images are located at Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Muzei,
Izobrazitel’nyi otdel (hereafter GIM IO), Papka 1204.
27
perceived divine figure reached its height around 1813-1814, when the tsar’s image
became associated with the “divine victory” over Napoleon.68 The war lubki from this
time reinforce Wortman’s argument, as Alexander I was lauded for his “all-powerful
wisdom and abundant strength, like a God.”69 While the Patriotic War continued to be
celebrated as a “people’s victory,” a theme that the lubki of 1812-1813 made clear, later
images began to stress the role of the tsar as the architect of this triumph.
Wortman’s assertion that Alexander replaced the “people’s victory” as the
primary visual message of Russian victory after 1813 does not hold entirely true,
however, for the lubki celebrating the heroism of the Cossack and Russian peasant
continued to be distributed throughout Russia–although now they coexisted with images
celebrating the leadership of the Russian tsar. Russian patriotism depicted in the war
lubok had a “divine” emperor whom viewers could contrast with the “insidious”
Napoleon. More importantly, the patriotism espoused in the images of 1812 stressed not
only the deeds of individual Russians, but also the overarching influence and guidance of
their tsar. This relationship between “tsar and people” continued to be stressed only
sporadically throughout the nineteenth century, but by the wars of the early twentieth
century it had all but disappeared from the lubok.70
What is striking about the patriotic culture of the war against Napoleon is its lack
of attention to Petersburg. Although the lubok artists who produced the images discussed
above all had training in the art of the Academy, all largely turned away from this
68
Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Volume
One: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995),
215-238.
69
GIM IO, Papka 1204, “The Ceremonial Entry in Paris of the Sovereign Emperor Alexander I.”
70
The relative absence of the tsar from images of the Russo-Japanese War and the Great War also
reflect trends in popular conceptions of nationalism after 1905, when the tsar no longer remained a symbol
of Russian national identity. See Josh Sanborn, “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the
Russian Nation: A Reexamination” and Scott Seregny, “Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship: The Russian
Adult Education Movement and World War I,” Slavic Review 59/2 (2000): 267-315.
28
tradition (although a few of the images employed classical themes). In their turn to a
more “authentic Russianness” and Russian artistic traditions, Terebenev and his fellow
artists excluded St. Petersburg in their ideas about Russian national identity. The war
against Napoleon, a defining moment both for Russia’s history and its sense of identity,
did not take place in Petersburg, nor did the cultural forms of the capital prove entirely
worthy of capturing the essence of 1812. St. Petersburg and all it stood for, in the work
of Terebenev, Ivanov, Venetsianov, and other lubok artists, had become the antithesis of
Russian distinctiveness. Many historians have noted how the war crystallized these
beliefs in the years after 1812, but few have discussed this process during the war itself,
when this kind of traumatic event initiated new trends in Russian culture.71 The lubok
artists and their work helps to illustrate how the turn inward, toward ideas about
“Russianness” and thus away from Petersburg, took place as a result of 1812. The
popularity of their images in turn helped to advance this concept, and it is to the reception
of these prints that we now turn.
Picturing Russian Patriotism After 1812
The fusing of classical themes, patriotic ideals, and the Russian popular image
helped to usher in a new patriotic culture in Russia after 1812. Newspaper reports during
71
Historians have studied the changes in Russian patriotism after 1812 in a variety of ways, but
rarely have they focused on popular culture during the war itself. For more on the cultural re-orientation in
Russia after 1812, see Peter Christoff, The Third Heart: Some Intellectual-Ideological Currents and Cross
Currents in Russia, 1800-1830 (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), which explores how Russian intellectuals
developed their own sense of national identity during the Napoleonic era and how it influenced the
Slavophiles and Westernizers. A more recent account that explores how the Napoleonic era influenced
Russian conservative thought is Alexander Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian
Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
1997). The war also popularized notions of defining the Russian character as distinct from the West, ideas
that had developed in the eighteenth century among literary figures such as Yakov Kniazhnin and Mikhail
Kheraskov. For more on this early cultural development, see Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural
History of Russia (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 58-59. Napoleon’s invasion also initiated a new
interest in Moscow as a site of Russianness, a belief captured in the images from Petersburg artists in 1812.
For more on this reorientation, see Sidney Monas, “St. Petersburg and Moscow as Cultural Symbols” in
Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture; and Richard Wortman, “Moscow and Petersburg: The Problem of Political
Center in Tsarist Russia, 1881-1914” in Sean Wilentz, Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics
Since the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985): 244-271.
29
the war discussed the images of the Petersburg artists and recorded their successful sales.
Terebenev’s prints in particular sold well, as one journal report confirmed, for “peddlers
trading engravings and lubok pictures supply the city and the village population with
thousands of portraits of the Russian emperor and the distinctive heroes (including
Kutuzov) of the war with Napoleon.”72 Other accounts of the lubok trade during the
Patriotic War note that the images of Terebenev, Ivanov, and others could be found in
Petersburg stores, newspapers, journals, and from street peddlers who specialized in the
lubok trade.73
The war years also transformed the popular prints into commercially viable
products. Terebenev’s lubki in particular sold so well that several publishers engaged in
a bidding war for his services. Many of the pictures from the war appeared for sale
before they had officially passed the censorship committees, such was the demand for the
images. Terebenev’s in particular attracted a fierce competition for his services. Initially
he sold his prints exclusively to Ivan Glazunov, a publisher with stores in St. Petersburg.
Glazunov in turn distributed the prints through his various stores and through the
peddlers employed to disseminate the prints throughout the country. In March 1813,
however, because of the tremendous sales of the Terebenev lubki, the artist signed a new
contract to work with a different publisher who would pay the artist more and who had
offices in Moscow as well as St. Petersburg. Because of the intense competition for the
prints, publishers began to denounce one another—in particular, the Petersburg publisher
Glazunov issued a statement that he was not related to the publishers of the same name
(Ivan and Matvei Glazunov, two brothers).
Particularly galling to the Petersburg
Glazunov was the fact that his Moscow counterparts had seized on the popularity of the
lubok and used the traditional markets, which were located in Moscow, to their
72
Quoted in Kaganovich, Ivan Ivanovich Terebenev, 119.
73
Ibid.
30
advantage.74 In the competition over the products of the patriotic culture, Moscow and its
publishers defeated St. Petersburg.
The years after the war consolidated the popularity of these prints and helped to
make them a permanent part of Russian patriotic culture and memory.
Published
accounts of participants from the war mentioned the role of the images in capturing the
spirit of the times, including an account by a French doctor captured during the retreat
from Moscow and taunted by a Russian landowner brandishing Terebenev’s prints.75 In
addition, the raek, or peepshow popular at Russian fairs, featured lubki that were placed
in a box and viewed with a magnifying glass. Peepshow storytellers, known as raeshniki,
provided explanations about the images that helped to make popular prints come to life.
After 1812 peepshows featuring wartime lubki became increasingly popular.76 Many of
the raeshniki were veterans of the war against Napoleon, and they helped to propagate
stories about the heroes of 1812 (including their own deeds) to whoever listened. The
lubki of the Patriotic War, therefore, became the source for popular entertainments for
years afterward, and in the process furthered the historical memory of the war itself.
Nineteenth-century Russian scholars also provided assessments of both the
lubok’s popularity and its impact in Russia during the Napoleonic invasion. Commenting
on the images of the Patriotic War, Ivan Snegirev, the tsarist censor responsible for lubki
but also a scholar of these images, noted in his 1861 work that the Russian government
“used the caricatures as a means for excitation in the people an eagerness to protect the
74
Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv (RGIA), f. 777, op. 27, d. 183, l. 118, no. 183;
d. 184, l. 22, no. 137; M. Peltzer, “Russkaia politicheskaia kartinka 1812 goda: usloviia proizvodstva i
khudozhestvennye osobennosti” in B. M. Sokolov, ed., Mir narodnoi kartinki (Moscow, 1999), 177.
75
Russkaia starina 1892, t. 73 (March): 594-596. The account is reprinted in Kaganovich, Ivan
Ivanovich Terebenev 1780-1815, 118-119. The doctor, de la Fliz, spoke Russian and translated the
account himself. According to de la Fliz, these images depicted “all the disasters of the retreat from
Moscow,” and though they exaggerated their subjects, they “represented the bitter truth.”
76
A. F. Nekrylova, Russkie narodnye gorodskie prazdniki, uveseleniia i zrelishcha (Leningrad,
1988), 95-125; A. M. Konechnyi, “Raek v sisteme peterburgskoi narodnoi kul’tury” Russkii folklor 25
(1989): 123-138.
31
fatherland from a powerful enemy.” Snegirev documented the widespread appeal of the
wartime images, which captured the “funny and the farcical combined with the awful and
even disgusting” features of that war, particularly the French retreat from Moscow. In
particular, he praised the work of Terebenev, who truly captured the “national spirit
[dukh narodnyi]” of the time.77 Dmitrii Rovinskii’s unsurpassed five-volume collection
of lubki, first published in 1881, listed a large number of the images from 1812, which he
viewed positively. In particular, Rovinskii found the images from the Patriotic War
interesting, and while they tended to exaggerate the history of the time, they also helped
to establish a popular memory of the victory over Napoleon.78 He catalogued nearly 150
lubki from 1812, listing their texts and the artists who created them in cases where this
information was known.
Rovinskii wrote that “patriotic lubki” were a particularly
popular form of these Russian images and believed that popular pictures from the
Patriotic War inspired Russians to victory and helped them form a lasting interpretation
of Napoleon’s invasion.
Vladimir Denisov, whose succinct work Voina i lubok first appeared during the
First World War, also attested to the importance of the lubki of 1812 and how the
memory of the war had found room for the memory of its images. He wrote that “the
Patriotic War left deep traces in Russian life,” and that the lubok’s depiction of the
ultimate victory over Napoleon was “involuntarily” impressed “in the memory of past
Russian army successes.” Denisov asserted that the lubki of 1812 marked the first time
that the patriotic lubok came into its own as a carrier of nationalism in Russia, and that its
77
Ivan Snegirev, Lubochnyia kartinki russkago naroda v Moskovskom mirie (Moscow, 1861),
133-134.
78
See A. F. Koni, “Dmitrii Aleksanrovich Rovinskii,” in Ocherki i vospominaniia: publichnyia
chteniia rechi, stat’i, i zamiatki (St. Petersburg, 1906), 588-590.
32
significance rested in its popularity and the lasting impressions it made in future images
of war.79
One cannot conclusively state that the images from 1812 helped to foster a
popular patriotism that took hold throughout Russia, but they certainly contributed to the
rethinking of national identity that took place throughout Russia in the wake of 1812. The
images from the war against Napoleon undoubtedly left a lasting mark. They not only
illustrated the “visual world” of the time; they also revealed a great deal about how the
artists who produced them defined “Russianness” in 1812.80
In the years immediately
following Napoleon’s defeat, for example, Terebenev’s images were reproduced in
newspapers, an illustrated children’s book for learning the alphabet, and even on sets of
fine china sold to Russia’s elites.81 A generation of Russian schoolchildren thus learned
to associate the letter “v” with the work “vorona,” or “crow,” complete with Terebenev’s
lubok “French Crow’s Soup (Figure 21).” Terebenev selected the images for his alphabet
himself, and even included works by Venetsianov and Ivanov. He wanted to leave a gift
to his countrymen that would help to continue the memory of 1812 in the years
afterwards, and again believed that the wartime images were the best means to do so.
The Azbuka 1812 goda eventually became more popularly called “Terebenev’s ABCs.”82
The French emperor and his troops, who provided the means by which Russians
defined themselves and expressed patriotism throughout this war, continued to be
79
Denisov, Voina i lubok, 19-21. V.A. Vereshchagin also published a three-volume study of
Russian caricature in 1912 to celebrate the “founding date” of Russian imagery. The second volume of the
study was devoted entirely to Terebenev, Ivanov, and Venetsianov. See Vereshchagin, Russkaia
karikatura.
80
Again, it is useful to note that the ways in which the lubki artists articulated Russian national
identity in 1812 corresponded to similar themes in all the arts. See Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in
Imperial Russia.
81
Kaganovich, Ivan Ivanovich Terebenev, 140; for the china reproductions, see I. A. Ezerskaia and
Iu. F. Prudnikov, Nedarom pomnit vsia Rossiia: otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda (Moscow, 1986).
82
The original Terebenev alphabet book was published in 1815, shortly after his death. It can be
found on the internet at: <http://www.museum.ru/museum/1812/English/Library/Azbuka/index.html>
33
depicted in lubki from later wars. Every successive Russian war, beginning with the
Crimean conflict and including the Great War, gave rise to images depicting the French
emperor, reminding Russians of the source of their “popular” patriotism. The Russian
government officially commissioned a reprint of all of Terebenev’s Patriotic War images
in 1855, during the siege of Sevastopol, in order to inspire its residents and all Russians
to defeat the new adversary.83 During the Soviet era, when the Nazi armies invaded
Russia on the same day that Napoleon had, poster artists began to make explicit
comparisons between the two “infidels.”
Napoleon’s image appeared in countless
posters, films, and other forms of popular culture, insuring that the memory of 1812
survived in Russian visual culture and Russian national identity.84
The artists who brought about this change in 1812 took different paths after the
war ended.
Terebenev died at the end of the war, in 1815.
His death helped to
consolidate his significance as a lubok artist and his images continued to inspire future
patriotic Russians, particularly after they appeared in Rovinskii’s collection. Curiously
(or perhaps fittingly), Terebenev’s son Alexander, wanted to be a sculptor. Alexander
studied at the Academy of Fine Arts after his father’s death and eventually made his mark
on the St. Petersburg scene. When Nicholas I ordered a New Hermitage building to be
constructed (1839-1851), the most important features of the building would be its
sculptures. Alexander Terebenev carved the most memorable of these sculptures, the ten
83
Kaganovich, Ivan Ivanovich Terebenev, 1780-1815, 120. In the midst of the Crimean War, the
paper Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti printed a special dedication to Terebenev and his Patriotic War
caricatures, which, according to the author, had helped to inspire Russians throughout 1812 and 1813. The
author wrote that he remembered viewing Terebenev’s images on the shop windows of St. Petersburg,
where they always drew a crowd.
84
N. G. Miniailo, “Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda v ‘Oknakh TASS’ (1941-1945)” in E. I.
Itkina, ed., Stranitsy khudozhestvennogo naslediia Rossii XVI-XX vekov (Moscow, 1997), 75-88. See also
the Second World War posters from the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace’s Russian and
Soviet Poster Collection: RU/SU 2112 (“The enemies and the hordes in great disarray”), RU/SU 1921.4
(“So it was, so it will be!”), and RU/SU 2129 (“The lion and the kitty”) are examples of Soviet posters
ridiculing Hitler as another Napoleon.
34
enormous figures of Atlas that hold up the building.85
A Terebenev tradition had
developed, and the family’s relationship to St. Petersburg and its culture came full circle.
Ivanov also took a similar path, returning to St. Petersburg and the familiar
confines of the artistic and cultural scene there. It was Aleksei Venetsianov, however,
who turned away from St. Petersburg the most. The outsider of the group, his patriotic
fervor of 1812 never extinguished itself in the years afterwards.
Venetsianov’s
experience in making prints that celebrated Russianness led him to pursue a career as a
painter. Beginning in 1819, he spent his summers at his estate in the Tver province,
where he painted scenes of peasant life. Venetsianov established an art school there that
explicitly rejected the Imperial Academy. His work in both respects led one Russian
critic in 1878 to claim that he began “a national Russian road” in art.86 Paintings such as
The Threshing Floor (1822-1823) gained Venetsianov this reputation, but in many
respects his peasant art represented a continuation of the themes he developed in his
wartime caricatures.87
Napoleon’s invasion, as the images of 1812 reveal, would not be forgotten by the
Russians. By launching an attack on Russia in 1812, the French emperor helped to
awaken a redefinition of Russian national identity that would continue to find expression
over the course of the century. The patriotism espoused in the prints of Terebenev and
his contemporaries served as one of the first expressions of the turn away from
Petersburg culture (embodied in the Academy) and toward that of Moscow after 1812.
Over the course of the next century, future wartime prints continued to capture this
turn—with one exception, all of the prints from the Crimean, Russo-Turkish, Russo85
Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture, 403.
86
Gray, “The Real and the Ideal,” 655. Venetsianov married an impoverished noblewoman from
Tver’ in 1815; he bought the country home the same year.
87
See Bowlt, “Russian Painting” and “Russian Caricature”; Gray, “The Real and the Ideal” for
more on Venetsianov after the war. Gray focuses on Venetsianov’s paintings and how their depictions of
peasants represented a blend of ideals taught in the Academy with the realist tradition underway in Russian
culture. In many respects, this blending occurred first in Venetsianov’s patriotic lubki.
35
Japanese, and First World Wars featured sites in Moscow or the Russian countryside, but
never the Imperial capital.88
Coda
The Great War of 1914 was a momentous event for Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Although he had already established himself as an avant-garde poet before 1914, the war
gave Mayakovsky the opportunity to indulge in one of his long-standing interests:
painting lubki. When he was a young child, Mayakovsky spent hours pouring over the
collection of Russian popular prints published by Dmitry Rovinskii. He particularly
enjoyed the images of 1812 and the patriotic culture captured in the lubki of Terebenev,
Venetsianov, and Ivanov. Mayakovsky’s early poetry, as he later wrote, was an attempt
to create a “lubok language,” one that combined the visual and emotional intensity of the
prints to the rhyme of verse. Part of the artistic world of the early twentieth century that
“rediscovered” the Russian lubok as an important national art, Mayakovsky decided to
produce the prints after war was declared in 1914.
His wartime lubki drew on the iconography of the Patriotic War prints.
Mayakovsky’s lubki ridiculed the German and Turkish enemies, placed the Russian
peasant and soldier at the center of his definition of nationhood, and furthered the
patriotic culture established in 1812—a culture that did not include St. Petersburg. After
his initial enthusiasm for the Great War, Mayakovsky grew disillusioned (he later
regretted his patriotism of 1914).
When Nicholas II abdicated in 1917, however,
Mayakovsky picked up his art materials again. From February 1917 until the 1920s,
Mayakovsky helped to found a visual culture for the Bolsheviks that built upon the lubok.
His ROSTA windows were explicit attempts to transfer the appeal of the tsarist popular
print to the new regime. Mayakovsky’s imagery and its significance paralleled that of
Terebenev’s in one more important way. Just like his inspiration, Mayakovsky also
88
See Stephen M. Norris, “Russian Images of War: The Lubok and Wartime Culture, 1812-1917”
(Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2002), Chapters 4-7.
36
wanted to leave a “gift” to the Soviet people that made use of his post-1917 prints. He
designed his own Soviet alphabet book for children that remained in use well into the
1970s.89 In more than one way, therefore, Mayakovsky furthered the legacy of 1812 and
the patriotic culture that emanated from that event.
89
See, for example, Galina Dutkina, Moscow Days: Life and Hard Times in the New Russia (New
York: Kodansha International, 1996), 3; and Evgeny Steiner, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary
Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Books (University of Washington Press, 1999). For more
on Mayakovsky during the First World War, see Stephen M. Norris, “Russian Images of War,” Chapter 8.
37
Figure 1
Figure 2: Lubok Peddlers
38
Figure 3: V. Vasnetsov, Book Sellers
Figure 4: Petr Sokolov, Checkers Players (1869)
39
Figure 5
Figure 6
40
Figure 7
Figure 8
41
Figure 9
Figure 10
42
Figure 11
Figure 12
43
Figure 13
Figure 14
44
Figure 15
Figure 16
45
Figure 17
Figure 18
46
Figure 19
Figure 20
47
Figure 21
48